The future role of the finance professional
While the future is always aspirational, an important question asked in our research is how to get there. In other words, what it is that we need to do now and what are the approaches, attitudes, skills, and competencies that finance needs to leverage to achieve and maximise our contribution and impact? The views shared with us concern lessons learnt from adaptations made during the COVID-19 pandemic, the challenges faced with global supply chains, resource strain, political shifts and conflicts, new social movements and ways of working, the calls to sustainability and DEI, and so much more. Our research has led to the conclusion that even though expert-level technical skills are the foundation, nowadays our role goes further and includes digitalisation, sustainability, value partnership, leadership, and continuous learning.
‘We cannot draw a line to say, “okay let us separate the data into financial and nonfinancial”. So, the important thing for finance people is how we can integrate everything into the financial ways. And vice versa. So, we can do the same, we can translate the financial return data into nonfinancial. So, for people, who don’t understand finance, we can lead them to understand very easily’.Finance Director, Automotive, China
We understand that digital transformation is in full swing and continues to challenge organisations, putting a healthy pressure on their resources, ways of working, and culture. At this stage, the abundance of data dispersed across all organisational functions and comprising financial and nonfinancial categories, historic numbers, and projections is the new normal. The unpredictability of business has long demanded iterative decision-making, but now data and digitalisation pose new challenges and impact our ability to be insightful and reliable. It requires a consultative style of working, making reasoned assumptions, multi-tasking, and agility. Some of our participants talked about the future shape of the profession as a fusion of data analytics, data science, accounting, and finance all overlapping and merging. But such synergy will not be fruitful if we lack exquisite partnership and communication skills. Again, it is no longer enough to just explain the technicalities behind numbers. We now need to effectively communicate the story they tell and ask the right questions, proactively working with our IT colleagues.
‘In our finance teams, we don’t necessarily have the tools or the skills to build these tools and dashboards, whereas our systems teams do. We do however have the contextual knowledge of the business, processes, and our internal systems as well as an understanding of the sorts of data and insights our stakeholders need. So having an integrated finance and systems team makes it a lot easier to produce and roll out these solutions.’
Business Controller, Engineering and Consultancy Services, UK
Following on from our research presented in Re-inventing finance for a digital world, Future of Finance 2.0 builds on how digitalisation shapes the role and impact of finance professionals. During interviews and roundtables, we had fruitful discussions concerning finance responsibilities and our analytical and reporting activities. Many participants observed that the line between IT and finance is blurring, but most thought that finance should not retain control over master data sets. Given the abundance of financial and nonfinancial information, decision-making is getting more complex. Often leaders need to make decisions while lacking ‘a single version of truth’ when it comes to the integrity and reconciliation of data sets. In some organisations, finance teams work closely with data scientists, whose specialist skills support finance. More often than that, finance roles expand to data analytics, exploring the opportunities and synergies there. Against that background, it is critical that we can communicate the compelling story of the organisation and its operations, bring numbers to life, and positively influence partners and colleagues.
Our research indicates that within the data and technology domain, management accountants and finance professionals engage and seek best practices in the following ways:
Collaborating with business units and partnering to ensure timely access, reporting, and accuracy of information
Proactively liaising with IT to support integrity and shape data pathways and system functionalities
Understanding the structure and frameworks of data systems and collaborating with data scientists
Maintaining proper risk perspective
Analysing both financial and nonfinancial data sets, linking them and rationalising
Partnering with data analysts to turn their outputs into business insights
Conducting data storytelling and communicating insights to achieve impact
Maintaining competence in the areas of data and technology and continuously upskilling
Educating colleagues to extract and interpret routine financial information
Proposing optimisations to existing technological infrastructure
Data and technology go well beyond finance, impacting not only operational decision-making but also the organisation’s overall strategy. In its role as a business integrator, the finance team is uniquely positioned to produce and report information, as well as to provide insights, guidance, and leadership.
Further investigation of the data and technology skills and competencies which finance professionals need to develop for success in the digital age can be found in Future of Finance 2.0 Emerging Themes: The digital journey of finance.
The future of the profession requires finance to embed itself in every function of the organisation and take a collaborative and forward-looking approach to work. Our participants reported they embrace partnerships beyond mere production of numbers. Therefore, business partnering for value creation is critical because this is how finance enables organisations to redefine and recreate value. Of course, the fundamental aspects of a financially trained professional are evergreen. Understanding investments, cash flows, profit targets, and their deviations are our bread and butter. When combined with objectivity and integrity, these skills continue to make us valuable contributors. Many of those core competencies have been crucial during the COVID-19 pandemic and have helped organisations adapt and stay on course.
But the role of finance continues to expand, demanding that we grow from strength to strength and go beyond numbers. Simply producing and interpreting numbers on a set schedule is no longer adequate. Business partnering means going beyond the approach where tasks and deadlines are fixed. It means being flexible and collaborating routinely with clients and colleagues. It involves proactiveness, commercial acumen, leadership, creativity, identifying opportunities to team up, and driving action. In other words, the role of finance makes no business sense if we only work in isolation and have no impact on business models and products. We need to be able to identify value drivers by collaborating within and across the organisation. Hence, business partnering is part of the evolution towards long-term value creation and a growing focus on contemporary value drivers, including sustainability, DEI and productivity.
‘I think that the flow of information is still the same, but the way this information is put together is actually a reflex of what the users of the information demand…ESG is not necessarily a project to save the world, even though it can be seen that way. It’s a project for divulging reporting to the users of that information, the information that they want to read.’
Director of Technical Accounting, Manufacturing Industry, Brazil
Sustainability will shape the future of organisations, and the ripple effects of this shift are already reaching finance teams. Expectations are that another change in finance processes is imminent as organisations adopt new transformation approaches tested when implementing digital or other strategic initiatives.
At this point in time, to say that finance professionals have clarity on what will be done and how it will be executed would be an exaggeration. Some see their input within the boundaries of our traditional role, linked to budgeting, control, reporting, and compliance. In this scenario, we challenge colleagues by asking: Do we have the budget for that? Can we support it? How long is it going to run? What’s the return? Are we compliant? How was that measured? Other participants, meanwhile, see sustainability more holistically. They spoke about making sustainability business cases that capture value chains and create innovative business models. Through such means, finance professionals empower themselves and endorse new ways of thinking and working, not simply to perpetuate their own self-interest, but rather to genuinely contribute and exceed societal expectations. The need to approach sustainability work ethically was reiterated often. Many of our participants were critical of greenwashing, recognising that we need to claim our cultural power and lead to dissuade our organisations from resorting to it.
The truth of the matter is that currently situations vary. The scope of finance engagement with sustainable practices could not be more different across countries, industries, and entities. But there is a shared understanding that finance needs to upskill and embrace a new ethos. This means that we must now perceive capital more broadly, through its multiple perspectives — financial, environmental, and social — and safeguard them all. What is more, this perception of capital is becoming a fundamental part of who we are.
Further information on what finance functions are already doing to tell their organisations’ sustainability value stories, the challenges they are facing and how they are transforming to address the complexity in telling ESG stories can be found in Future of Finance 2.0 Emerging Themes: Sustainable business and ESG.
Our research found that successful finance leaders will engage and seek best practices in the following ways:
Leading performance management and reporting initiatives beyond mere compliance
Adopting agile approaches coupled with creativity and entrepreneurship
Partnering with HR to enhance trust
Listening, communicating, and advocating
Nurturing emotional intelligence in themselves and their teams
Receiving and providing coaching and mentoring
Creating a diverse network, ensuring inclusion
Interactions and enquiries with finance leaders, learners, and academics revealed an increased level of complexity, if not turbulence, both within and outside organisations. All drivers of change discussed here contribute to that complexity and call for a transformational style of leadership that empowers people and cherishes their diversity. Building and maintaining trust is also critical because, now more than ever, we need flexibility and agility — approaches that can only succeed if people feel safe and motivated to change, adapt, and contribute.
‘I think, earlier from a leadership style standpoint to a large extent, and in a lot of organisations, only the result mattered…Now, there’s a lot to means as well, and how you’re achieving those results with the expectations of employees building in this a certain way, that you’re expected to lead, understand, engage, and motivate the organisation, collaborate across functions, versus if you’re delivering great results, you’re a great leader and then it stops there’. Commercial Finance Director, Retail, Singapore
‘I don’t want a clear boundary behind what a job scope is, because then I’m limiting the potential and not setting myself up for above and beyond results…I want people to take that initiative, own up to what is possible. Because for me, every role is what you make out of it’. Commercial Finance Director, Retail, Singapore
